July 2024 Market Report

David and Julie hit the air with recently released stats from the doldrums of Summer.  Find out what they're seeing out there on the street, in their listings and with buyers.  What's affecting the market: elections, NAR Settlement, plethora of inventory...   Condos and Single Family Homes in Pinellas county is the subject du jour.  This month, they have shortened the episode a bit, so you can get the facts quick and accurate.

Want to work with us? David Vann can be found here, and Julie Jones can be found here! Reach out! We're nice, and we'd love to hear from you!

Transcript

0:00

I would say good afternoon, but it seems like nighttime. Yes, that's because we're having massive storms here in St. Petersburg every single day. There are huge thunderstorms and everybody's experiencing a lot of water intrusion in their houses. I am. I was. Also, my gutter was like gushing over, right? My gutter was full also. And that was a part of the problem. All the clips broke because so much water came down. One of our gutters has been mispositioned where it's funneling the water towards the house. So the shed near our garage. Which was actually great because we got to throw away a bunch of stuff that I didn't want in that shed. It was a forced clean out. That was good. Yes. I was glad to get rid of some stuff and Dylan was home and they made five trips to the dump and got rid of a lot of stuff. So that was good. Yeah, a lot of storms, but you know, it's hurricane season, it's hurricane season. We just had a tropical storm come, but we are, you know, the weather, the last few afternoons has been very similar, almost worse than the tropical storm with the heavy rains. Several inches of water in one hour, flooded out many parts of town, lightning, lightning, lost my dishwasher. Oh man. And last week we had a lot of morning storms, which was awkward because then I couldn't go swim. The workout schedule got right. The workout schedule got messed up, but I mean, when you have those thunderstorms, you get your wakes up at five o'clock in the morning and then you're up and then, they seem to repeat at the same time of day, last week it was morning. This week it's you know, evening. We're still in August and today is our statistics day. We're going to keep it short and sweet so that you'll continue listening. And then we'll have some good subjects in our next podcast episode but today we're going to be talking about July, 2024 real estate statistics for Pinellas County. Right. We wanted to be able to cut back our episode a little bit so that you can maybe get a glimpse of what's happening in the market in about 10 minutes. Well, let's get into it. I'm Julie Jones with Smith and Associates Real Estate. And I'm David Vann with REMAX Metro. And the Real Property St. Pete podcast. That's right. You see what's happening in your everyday life. Once a month, you get a review and say, okay, here's what it looks like is happening. And that's the answer. So we'll start we'd like to talk about single family and the absorption rate is 31 percent for July of 2024. Which is basically unchanged from June of 2024, which is 30%. And what does that mean to us, Julie? Well, we really like to use the absorption rate as a guide for how the market is doing. It's defined by the rate at which active listings are selling in a given market. And it's calculated by dividing the number of closed sales by the number of active listings. That's right. And so a low absorption rate means the homes are selling slowly. And a high absorption rate means that homes are selling quickly. So that's right. And I love your analogy. We keep going back to it at 31%. That means that three out of 10 homes are going to sell in July. Right. Yeah. I do love to talk about that. I think your likelihood to sell is that number. So 31 percent I know it's a broad stroke, but it is single family homes. In Pinellas County. That's a drilling down pretty good. It's not a national number, regional number, state number. It's single family homes in Pinellas County. The condos are at 18 percent and that's or 16 percent in June. So that's a slightly better at 18%, but it's still basically unchanged. Yeah. The condo market is pretty tough right now. Not many pending sales. Long days on market. But with the milestone inspections and reserves needing to be increased, a lot of the monthly HOA fees for several buildings have gone up somewhat intolerably for buyers. Around this time of year is a good prediction. So we like to figure out what we think is going to happen. Changes with the market as we head into condo selling season, which would be December, January, February, March, right? Do you have a prediction? I don't think that things are going to change much. I think it may have a, you may have a small tick up. I haven't put a lot of time into thinking about it, but there's just such an onslaught of inventory that you're really gonna have to sell a lot of property to move the needle on the results. Yes. I mean, I like to think that, and we're going to talk about pending listings in some of our favorite neighborhoods, Old Northeast, Cuyahosta, some of the neighborhoods that I work in a lot. And the thing that is really startling about those neighborhoods is there's no pending listings. I mean, I've been looking for three weeks. I've got a new listing coming on the market next week after Labor Day and You know, I've been looking for those pendings cause the pendings mark the immediate market. You know, those are the things that say, okay, somebody made a deal. I've had some open houses and they've been great. Well attended 12 in one and 15 in another. And I'm like, why have none of these buyers bought anything? Why didn't anybody go to contract? I've been watching for three weeks and nobody's gone to contract. So we haven't lost a buyer that went and bought something else. Nobody bought, it's like so same thing, Caicasta, we've got six active listings there and you know, you've got zero pending. So I love it when you challenge me with a question. Love is the operative word. Do you think that's the market conditions or do you think it's the pricing of the properties? Well, the pricing keeps going down, but I don't see the downward pricing making a difference. I mean, over the last three weeks, there's been lots of Price reductions. We reduced to 15 19th Ave. Northeast by 50, 000, got some people interested, but they still stayed on the sidelines and nothing happened. I just don't understand but, you know, I get it, you know, like, it's hard to know because it's your listing, but I wonder the fed has been talking about lowering the rate interest rates are actually down significantly this week for right now and wonder if, People are holding out watching for that. There's no doubt that the rates are going to go down. They're saying they will. It might be a half point. That would be good. They're down today. I do think that the mortgage rates are better today. But I do think that we're going to see a fed rate cut here in the next few days. Do you think that is impacting anyone? I'm going to answer my own question. I don't know that it necessarily is because I think a lot of those buyers are cash buyers. Here's what I think. what's going to happen is when you've got this much inventory sitting out there and the prices keep going down and down and down that eventually Somebody's going to say, that's a deal and they're going to make a deal. They're going to go get it. And then the other buyers that are sitting there watching that neighborhood, not making a move, they see one of the properties going to contract. And they're going to think, that was a good one. That was a good deal. And then they might seem to come in waves. Yeah. And then maybe two or three people by so two or three houses go pending. That's when it's going to start. And I think that'll be mid to late September. That's what I think. I think that's, what's going to happen to the single family homes, the condos. I just don't think there's enough sales to make a movement. We pulled a property off the market to let it sit for a few months and I sent the updated comparables to that seller. There's no improvement in the market in that particular condo has seven buildings. There's no activity. There's nothing going pending I saw a property on the 10th floor and it's gone below 300, 000. They definitely do not care about the price. It's an estate situation. They just want the place sold. And I looked at the photos and it's a nice condo. And I was like, Whoa, that's not good. Because, you know, when you have an estate situation and the beneficiaries. Don't necessarily care what it sells for they willing to lower the price and That's gonna reset some stuff about the market It's important to note that once that sells, it does reset the market. There's, but it's not people want to believe that that. It's just one sale, but it, it will impact the market. Most of the people in that building are buying for cash. It's a 55 plus, beach type property. So the appraisal is not necessarily important, but the buyers know what it's sold for. But that's the type of thing that might get things moving. Hey, you get a pending listing there. You know, people think, okay, well, that's something let's go after another one, see if we can get it and they'll get a price lower and close to that. They may have to pay more, but still, that's kind of the tipping point. If you get two or three pending, That will motivate some buyers to make some stuff happen. It's interesting. Our office had an economist come in and talk today and he said, the first one to sell is the winner because everyone will use that as a gauge and want to purchase. Buyers will use that as the gauge and want to purchase for less. Making yourself first is a pretty important thing in this type of market. you could sell for more, but you know, the sellers in this market they're going to make a deal if they can. And I just put something on a contract very close to list price. Back to the numbers. Close sales are down one and a half percent, eight 82. 2023 and 869 this year paid in cash is down 4. 7%. The median sale price is down 1. 1 percent still hovering around 475. We get to the median percent of original list price received in July of 2024 is 95. 6. I swear these numbers are almost exactly the same as what we read last month. It's 95 and a half percent is what you're getting on your list price. Price the median days to contract is 29 days versus 11 days last year. That's crazy. 11 days last year. Yeah. It was still pretty quick. It's hard to believe it, but I think you're right. I believe last month was right around there. 27 days, I think somewhere between 27 and 29 days. And I think it was 60 on the median time to sale. And that's up 36. 7%. We're at 67 days as a median time to sell right now. That feels pretty right. And a new pending sales. I mean, this is the thing that we're talking about. down 6. 4 percent from July of 23. We're at 838 versus 895. That's, what we're seeing. We're not seeing any pending sales. New listings are up 20%, which is great for feeding that inventory, which the overall inventory is up 111%. That's 3, 100. Properties for sale versus 1480 in July of 2023. And once again, the exact same month supply 3. 8, what we're calling four months of inventory up 123 and a half percent from July of 2023. So, you know, all this stuff continues to bear out what we're talking about. And these numbers are just almost twins of what we saw in June. Typical summer market. People going into hurricane season here, August, September. what do you think about the election? do you think the election is having effect? People ask me that all the time. In prior. Election years for the presidential election. It's definitely impacted my business. I haven't had anyone say that to me directly, but I was talking to some agents in the office today and they said that they feel it has had an impact. So I'm not sure that I have the right answer to that question just yet. I do think that no matter your political persuasion. I think when Biden dropped out of the race, it did create some positivity for some people that were otherwise not positive. I agree with that. I think it's more of a competition now that you have the candidates that you have in place is definitely going to be a little more competitive there. I think it probably settled things down a little bit too. August is a tough month and we're always able to do a couple of transactions in August. So we can have a couple of closings in September. I think because of the settling down, We're going to be a little better off in September. I think I would be more worried if we were in the place we were A month ago with Biden as a candidate. I agree with that. And we're not very political here. We're just reading the tea leaves and you can feel what people are saying. I think everybody knows that that's the case. I think we may see the anxiety tick up again as we get closer to November. I think so too. And as things heat up in the race, I think that it's a very likely possibility and it could impact the market and continue the slowness that we're feeling at the end of summer here. Yeah. I don't think there's any statistical stuff that says that election years are bad for real estate markets. I don't think you can show that. No. And that's why I'm like. For me personally, I'm not feeling or hearing the impact of it, but certainly things are slow, right? Well, let me throw this back out there because, and we're getting a little long here, but this is a great introduction to one of our next podcasts I really think that some of the consumers and all of the realtors and all of the brokers have definitely been confused about how to operate the business. Yes. Some big changes with the buyer's agent, real estate commission and how that's handled. If you're interested in hearing some facts. and processes. Our next episode is going to cover that for you. That's right. We're going to talk about some of my opinions and some of the subjects around the new NAR settlement agreement and hope you'll check in for that. Cause that will be a fun conversation. Julia and I are going to been waiting to have that conversation until things really started to happen. And I think we're in a spot where we can do that now. I think so too. All right. Are we all done with the statistics? I think we are. I'm looking forward to next month to see if there are any changes to the actual results. I'm starting to get some offers on properties that have been listed for 60 to 180 days and so that's encouraging. I'm hoping that will continue as we head into fall and we'll have another update for you next month. That's right. And I'm David Band with the Real Property St. Pete Podcast and REMAX Metro. And I'm Julie Jones with Smith and Associates Real Estate. All right. And see you next month.